Infinite Possibility : Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier

Discover how to provide experiences for your customers that combine the real with the virtual. Joseph Pine and Jim Gilmore's classic The Experience Economy identified a seismic shift in the business world: to set yourself apart from your competition, you need to stage experiences—memorable events that engage people in inherently personal ways. But as consumers increasingly experience the world through their digital gadgets, companies still only scratch the surface of technology-infused experiences. So Pine and coauthor Kim Korn show you how to create new value for your customers with offerings that fuse the real and the virtual. Think of the Xbox Kinect, which combines virtual video games with a powerful physical dimension—you play by moving your own body; new apps that, when you point your smartphone camera at a real street, overlay digital information about the scene onto the image; and virtual dashboards that track the real world, moment by moment. Digital technology offers limitless opportunities—you really can create anything you want —but real-world experiences have a richness that virtual ones do not. So how can you use the best of both? How do you make sense of such infinite possibility? What kinds of experiences can you create? Which ones should you offer? Pine and Korn provide a profound new tool geared to exploring and exploiting the digital frontier. They delineate eight different realms of experience encompassing various aspects of Reality and Virtuality and, using scores of examples, show how innovative companies operate within and across each realm to create extraordinary customer value. Follow them out onto the digital frontier to discover the opportunities that abound for your business. "This book will inspire out-of-the-box thinking for anyone looking to do it differently or better. Infinite Possibility is a must-read and a great vision for technology intersecting with our five senses to create experiences consumers will want." —Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association "Pine and Korn take you on an amazing journey from Reality to Virtuality and stop at all the best corners along the way. Infinite Possibility provides an extremely robust framework to help you grasp the concepts and gives practical guidance on how any organization can make it happen right now." —Chris Parker, Senior Vice President and CIO, LeasePlan Corporation In 1999 Joseph Pine and Jim Gilmore identified a seismic shift in the modern econ- omy. To set yourself apart from your competition, you needed to offer your customers more than just great goods or attentive service. You needed to offer experiences? memorable events that engage people in inherently personal ways. We?re now deep into this Experience Economy. But the physical world, bounded as it is by matter, space, and time, offers limited opportunities for creating experiences. Digital technology, on the other hand, offers limitless opportunities?you can create anything you want with immaterial bits, in virtual places, without the constraints of linear time. Which is precisely the problem. How do you make sense of and sort through such infinite possibility? What kinds of experiences can you create? Which ones should you offer? In Infinite Possibility, Pine and coauthor Kim Korn provide a profound new tool geared to the task of exploring what they call the cosmos incogniti of the digital frontier, the unknown worlds out there to be discovered, explored, and exploited. They delineate eight different realms of experience encompassing various aspects of Reality and Virtuality and, using scores of examples, show how innovative compa- nies operate within and across each realm to create extraordinary customer value. Think of the Xbox Kinect, which combines virtual video games with a powerful physical dimension?you play by moving your own body. Or new apps that, when you point your smartphone camera at a real street, lay digital information about the scene over the image. Follow Pine and Korn out onto the digital frontier to discover the opportunities that abound for your business " Joseph Pine and Jim Gilmore{u2019}s classic The Experience Economy identified a seismic shift in the business world: to set yourself apart from your competition, you need to stage experiences{u2014}memorable events that engage people in inherently personal ways. But as consumers increasingly experience the world through their digital gadgets, companies still only scratch the surface of technology-infused experiences. So Pine and coauthor Kim Korn show you how to create new value for your customers with offerings that fuse the real and the virtual. Think of the Xbox Kinect, which combines virtual video games with a powerful physical dimension{u2014}you play by moving your own body; new apps that, when you point your smartphone camera at a real street, overlay digital information about the scene onto the image; and virtual dashboards that track the real world, moment by moment. Digital technology offers limitless opportunities{u2014}you really can create anything you want{u2014}but real-world experiences have a richness that virtual ones do not. So how can you use the best of both? How do you make sense of such infinite possibility? What kinds of experiences can you create? Which ones should you offer? Pine and Korn provide a profound new tool geared to exploring and exploiting the digital frontier. They delineate eight different realms of experience encompassing various aspects of Reality and Virtuality and, using scores of examples, show how innovative companies operate within and across each realm to create extraordinary customer value. Follow them out onto the digital frontier to discover the opportunities that abound for your business. " Provides a fresh model to help readers conceptualize and combine various aspects of the virtual and the real to create breakthrough customer experiences. This title delineates eight different realms of digital/real experience, and shows how innovative companies operate within - and across - each to create extraordinary customer value World-renowned business strategist and bestselling and award-winning author of ""The Experience Economy"" Joe Pine, with Kim Korn, explain how businesses can weather the rising tide of commoditization by leveraging digital technologies-and especially virtual experiences--to create value for customers Joseph Pine and Jim Gilmore's classic The Experience Economy identified a seismic shift in the business world: to set yourself apart from your competition, you need to stage experiences